Announcing NetBox

Update: NetBox has been released!

Several years ago, I lamented the few options available for a provider-grade IPAM solution. Specifically, I explained why building a custom application would be undesirable:

Could I create a custom IPAM solution with everything we need? Sure! The problem is that I'm a network engineer, not a programmer (a natural division of labor which, it seems, is mostly to blame for the lack of robust IPAM solutions available). Even if I had the time to undertake such a project, I have little interest in providing long-term maintenance of it.

But I suppose time makes fools of us all.

Nearly one year ago, I started developing an IPAM application as part of my day job. Leveraging my experience with the Django Python framework, I had a working proof-of-concept in just a week. Over the next several months, the project grew more mature and began to take on additional roles: data center infrastructure management, circuit tracking, and credentials storage. Today, the tool functions as our "source of truth" for many aspects of our infrastructure. We call it NetBox.

Continue reading · 29 comments

Announcing NetBox

Several years ago, I lamented the few options available for a provider-grade IPAM solution. Specifically, I explained why building a custom application would be undesirable:

Could I create a custom IPAM solution with everything we need? Sure! The problem is that I'm a network engineer, not a programmer (a natural division of labor which, it seems, is mostly to blame for the lack of robust IPAM solutions available). Even if I had the time to undertake such a project, I have little interest in providing long-term maintenance of it.

But I suppose time makes fools of us all.

Nearly one year ago, I started developing an IPAM application as part of my day job. Leveraging my experience with the Django Python framework, I had a working proof-of-concept in just a week. Over the next several months, the project grew more mature and began to take on additional roles: data center infrastructure management, circuit tracking, and credentials storage. Today, the tool functions as our "source of truth" for many aspects of our infrastructure. We call it NetBox.

Continue reading · 6 comments

IDG Contributor Network: Algolia moves beyond web search to place search

Algolia offers a hosted search platform. That means if you're a developer wanting to offer search within your applications and websites, you just integrate Algolia's search engine and it does it all for you—allowing you to focus on what is important: your app. Since its inception in 2012, Algolia has gained over 1,500 customers.Algolia API returns search results quickly and offers a search-as-you-type experience for end users. A perfect example of farming out parts of an application to third parties, Algolia follows in the footsteps of communication platforms such as Twilio and email platforms such as Sendgrid. To deliver both economics and speed, Algolia built itself a distributed, cloud-based, search network. It leverages 12 individual data centers globally to deliver a claimed 50ms response time for search within the top markets globally.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft fixes critical flaws in Windows, IE, Edge, and Office

Microsoft has fixed more than 40 vulnerabilities in its products Tuesday, including critical ones in Windows, Internet Explorer, Edge, and Office.The vulnerabilities are covered in 16 security bulletins, six of which are marked as critical and the rest as important. This puts the total number of Microsoft security bulletins for the past six months to more than 160, a six-month record during the past decade.Companies running Windows servers should prioritize a patch for a critical remote code execution vulnerability in the Microsoft DNS Server component, covered in the MS16-071 bulletin.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft fixes critical flaws in Windows, IE, Edge, and Office

Microsoft has fixed more than 40 vulnerabilities in its products Tuesday, including critical ones in Windows, Internet Explorer, Edge, and Office.The vulnerabilities are covered in 16 security bulletins, six of which are marked as critical and the rest as important. This puts the total number of Microsoft security bulletins for the past six months to more than 160, a six-month record during the past decade.Companies running Windows servers should prioritize a patch for a critical remote code execution vulnerability in the Microsoft DNS Server component, covered in the MS16-071 bulletin.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Spy boss warns of IoT hacks crippling whole cities

Large cities could crash to a halt “with the click of a button,” the Telegraph newspaper has reported. The head of spying for the United Kingdom has apparently warned that Internet of Things (IoT) adoptation increases the risk of hackers bringing “major cities to a standstill.”Robert Hannighan, the director of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British equivalent of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States, made the warning at a science festival in the U.K. recently, the Telegraph writes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Spy boss warns of IoT hacks crippling whole cities

Large cities could crash to a halt “with the click of a button,” the Telegraph newspaper has reported. The head of spying for the United Kingdom has apparently warned that Internet of Things (IoT) adoptation increases the risk of hackers bringing “major cities to a standstill.”Robert Hannighan, the director of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British equivalent of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States, made the warning at a science festival in the U.K. recently, the Telegraph writes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

‘Spam king’ Sanford Wallace sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for Facebook phishing scam

Self-styled spam king Sanford Wallace was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison on Tuesday for a phishing scam that resulted in the sending of over 27 million messages to Facebook users.Last August, Wallace admitted to compromising around 500,000 Facebook accounts, using them to send over 27 million spam messages through Facebook's servers, between November 2008 and March 2009.Sentencing had been scheduled for last December, but it has taken the court almost a year to reach a sentencing decision.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

‘Spam king’ Sanford Wallace sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for Facebook phishing scam

Self-styled spam king Sanford Wallace was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison on Tuesday for a phishing scam that resulted in the sending of over 27 million messages to Facebook users.Last August, Wallace admitted to compromising around 500,000 Facebook accounts, using them to send over 27 million spam messages through Facebook's servers, between November 2008 and March 2009.Sentencing had been scheduled for last December, but it has taken the court almost a year to reach a sentencing decision.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

9 Emerging Storage Technologies To Watch

This company wants to take on Slack with video messaging for enterprises

It's a rare consumer today who doesn't use a mobile video and messaging app like Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, or Vine, but such capabilities are still few and far between on the enterprise side.So argues Samba Tech, a Brazilian company that on Wednesday set out to fill that gap with a free mobile video app called Kast.Samba Tech is an independent distributor of online videos in Latin America, and it's gathered US $3 million in funding to support Kast's U.S. launch. It's also partnered with Microsoft and built Kast on top of Azure.Essentially, the company hopes to outdo Slack as the enterprise messaging platform of choice, becoming the corporate world's equivalent of Snapchat. Kast aims to go beyond tools like email, text, and chat and allow users to bring audio and video posts directly to select teams and channels, both at the office and on the go.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This startup may have built the world’s fastest networking switch chip

Networking has undergone radical changes in the past few years, and two startup launches this week show the revolution isn’t over yet.Barefoot Networks is making what it calls a fully programmable switch platform. It came out of stealth mode on Tuesday, the same day 128 Technology emerged claiming a new approach to routing. Both say they’re rethinking principles that haven’t changed since the 1990s.Now is a good time to shake up networking, because IT itself is changing shape, says Nemertes Research analyst John Burke.“Everybody pretty much wants and needs their IT services to work continuously and scalably,” Burke said. Enterprises need shorter communication delays, a way to scale networks up or down without months of preparation, and a distributed architecture to prevent breakdowns from one hardware failure. It’s happening because many enterprise applications just can’t stop working without dire consequences.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This startup may have built the world’s fastest networking switch chip

Networking has undergone radical changes in the past few years, and two startup launches this week show the revolution isn’t over yet.Barefoot Networks is making what it calls a fully programmable switch platform. It came out of stealth mode on Tuesday, the same day 128 Technology emerged claiming a new approach to routing. Both say they’re rethinking principles that haven’t changed since the 1990s.Now is a good time to shake up networking, because IT itself is changing shape, says Nemertes Research analyst John Burke.“Everybody pretty much wants and needs their IT services to work continuously and scalably,” Burke said. Enterprises need shorter communication delays, a way to scale networks up or down without months of preparation, and a distributed architecture to prevent breakdowns from one hardware failure. It’s happening because many enterprise applications just can’t stop working without dire consequences.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Free network software might radically change how routing works

Radical new ideas are hitting network technology these days.On Tuesday, one new startup promised to make switches fully programmable. Another, routing software company 128 Technology, said it would fix the Internet.What 128 is proposing is a fundamentally different approach to routing, one that the company says will make networking simpler and more secure.The Internet was designed just to send packets from a source to a destination, but it’s evolved into a platform for delivering content and services among large, private networks. These complex tasks call for capabilities beyond basic routing, like security and knowing about the state of a session, said Andy Ory, 128’s CEO. He was the founder of Acme Packet, a session border controller company Oracle acquired in 2013. His new company is named after Route 128, the famed Massachusetts tech corridor where its headquarters is located.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Free network software might radically change how routing works

Radical new ideas are hitting network technology these days.On Tuesday, one new startup promised to make switches fully programmable. Another, routing software company 128 Technology, said it would fix the Internet.What 128 is proposing is a fundamentally different approach to routing, one that the company says will make networking simpler and more secure.The Internet was designed just to send packets from a source to a destination, but it’s evolved into a platform for delivering content and services among large, private networks. These complex tasks call for capabilities beyond basic routing, like security and knowing about the state of a session, said Andy Ory, 128’s CEO. He was the founder of Acme Packet, a session border controller company Oracle acquired in 2013. His new company is named after Route 128, the famed Massachusetts tech corridor where its headquarters is located.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: SQL Server 2016 boosts speed, analytics

Microsoft calls SQL Server 2016 the “biggest leap forward” in the 27-year evolution of the SQL Server database. As we’ll see, despite the excess of hype, the SQL Server 2016 database offers enterprises a number of attractive new capabilities, including built-in R analytics, querying of external Hadoop and Azure data stores, and neat management and data security features.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Review: SQL Server 2016 boosts speed, analytics

Microsoft calls SQL Server 2016 the “biggest leap forward” in the 27-year evolution of the SQL Server database. As we’ll see, despite the excess of hype, the SQL Server 2016 database offers enterprises a number of attractive new capabilities, including built-in R analytics, querying of external Hadoop and Azure data stores, and neat management and data security features.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Laid-off with a non-compete? Bill would guarantee salary

Non-compete agreements are controversial for many reasons, but what may be worst of all: Even if you are laid off from your job, a non-compete agreement may still apply.California has made non-compete agreements unenforceable, but Massachusetts has not. Some opponents say that's partly the result of lobbying by EMC, which has considerable clout as a major state employer, headquartered in the Boston suburb of Hopkinton.But the pending $67 billion merger of EMC with Dell, and the prospect of merger-related layoffs, is spurring a new attack on non-compete agreements.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft bought LinkedIn for your relationship data

If you think of LinkedIn as a social network or an online recruitment service, then you may well be scratching your head about why Microsoft would spend more on it than it has on any other acquisition. But consider that Microsoft has a graph that covers how you’re connected to people by email, documents, messages, meetings and address books, while LinkedIn has a graph that covers jobs, skills, colleagues, and professional connections. That’s two separate sets of information that would be much more useful together.Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has already talked about how the Microsoft Graph and the Office Graph are some of the company’s most valuable assets. Think about what you could get by combining those with the graph that represents the professional networks of your employees and partners and adding machine learning that can pick out who and what is actually relevant to you in the sea of all the people and resources you’re connected to.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Sapho wants to resolve that enterprise mobile app barrier

No one argues against the contention that enterprises and, more importantly, their stakeholders (both internal and external) are increasingly demanding access to core systems on a remote/mobile basis. Still, there is much debate about the best way to actually deliver that mobile access.Several schools of thought exist. First, we have the revolutionaries who suggest that existing applications are fundamentally flawed, inflexible and large, meaning they're unable to deliver what enterprise customers need. Proponents of this perspective say enterprises should pretty much take an entirely new look at how they work from a technology paradigm. These organizations take a Netflix-like approach to the problem space, deciding to re-architect from the ground up to meet their needs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here